The Subtle Knife

The Subtle Knife was published in 1997 as the second of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, following Northern Lights. It is shorter and harder than the first book: the school-and-scholarship material is gone, the children are separated from the adults who had been looking after them, and the story spends most of its length in the city of Cittagazze, where the adults have all gone and the children have been left with the consequences.

Will Parry is the new viewpoint. He comes from the same Oxford as the reader, and his introduction is a domestic tragedy in which he protects his mother and ends up with blood on his hands. Lyra arrives in his world with her daemon Pantalaimon and no way home, and the two of them work out a partnership that the rest of the trilogy depends on. The knife of the title is a tool with rules attached, and the rules matter: whoever holds it has to accept what using it costs him, which is the theme that runs through the series.

The novel introduces the alethiometer's counterpart, the subtle knife, and the figure of Lord Asriel's ambitions from a distance, along with the witches and the aeronauts who become the trilogy's army. It ends on a cliff, the way the middle volumes of a sequence usually do, and it assumes the reader has come through Northern Lights first, which is the volume that sets up the daemons, the alethiometer and the Magisterium. The third book, The Amber Spyglass, followed in 2000.